Saturday June 20, 2009

New laws that cut down on the number of payday loans borrowers can get have drastically reduced the number of the short-term, high-interest loans issued in Virginia.

Last year, Virginia's payday lenders made nearly 3.4 million payday loans, or about 281,000 each month. Through the end of May, lenders had issued 226,807 loans, an average of 45,000 per month - an 84 percent decline.

The Bureau of Financial Institutions derived the data from a database that began tracking the loans at the first of the year. The database was required as part of reforms that passed the General Assembly in 2008.

Legislators limited borrowers to one payday loan at a time and doubled the amount of time borrowers had to repay the loans, among other changes.

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)